WordPress freelancer in Cologne for media sites with many posts and pictures

What a media site can lose in a migration

Each article, archive page and picture of a media site has an address that search engines, bookmarks and other sites point to. A migration that drops those addresses loses the visits they bring.

WordPress creates many addresses per post. A post with a few pictures answers under its own address, under an attachment page per picture and under each size of each picture, and it appears in category, tag, author and date archives and in feeds. A sitemap lists only some of them.

Google’s documentation for site moves asks to include images and videos in the plan and to keep the forwarding for as long as possible, generally at least a year. It also warns that rankings can fluctuate while Google recrawls the site (Google Search Central, updated 2026-08-20).

What the new site does with the archive

Posts keep their address where it is clean and forward where it changes. Picture files keep their names, and their alt texts and captions move with them. Archive pages with readers get a place on the new site.

The text of each article is in the HTML when the page loads, so search engines and AI assistants can read and quote it. On a static site in Astro an old article is a finished file. A paywall, member logins or subscriptions run on Symfony, Laravel or Node.js with a database, next to the archive.

I know this work from the editor’s side. As editor in chief of an information portal on construction projects I wrote articles and interviewed decision-makers from real estate and politics, and many contributors write for the portal. By January 2024 it reached more than one million readers a year. Details: An information portal with a million readers a year.

The address inventory of a WordPress media site

The inventory lists each type of address a WordPress media site answers under and where it goes on the new site. The examples use a made-up post.

Address type	Example	On the new site
Post	/2023/05/new-tower-approved/	The same address, or forwarded to the new one
Category archive	/category/housing/	A topic page with the same articles
Tag archive	/tag/data-centers/	A topic page if it has readers, else permanently removed
Author archive	/author/editor-name/	The author’s page with the author’s articles
Date archive	/2023/05/	The list of that year, or permanently removed
List pages	/category/housing/page/3/	The matching page of the new list
Attachment page	/new-tower-approved/tower-render/	Forwarded to the post that shows the picture
Picture in a size	/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/tower-1024x683.jpg	Forwarded to the picture file on the new site
Feed	/feed/ and /category/housing/feed/	A feed at the same address
Search results	/?s=tower	Not forwarded; search pages stay out of the index

The list comes from three sources: the sitemap, the server logs and the database. Picture sizes that other sites embed often show up only in the logs, so a migration that works from the sitemap alone misses them.

Who I am

I am Michael Wutzke, an IT architect for data platforms in Frankfurt with more than twenty years in IT and media. I have published articles in specialist media on real estate, finance and insurance, and today I am also an editor at the business magazine Business Punk. I moved this site off WordPress with Claude as coding agent. Details: Background.